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The Adirondacks: A History of America's First Wilderness
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About The Adirondacks: A History Of America's First
Product Description A New York Times Notable Book His book is a romance, a story of first love between Americans and a thing they call "wilderness." For it was in the Adirondacks that masses of non-Native Americans first learned to cherish the wilderness as a place of recreation and solace. In this lyrical narrative history, the author reveals that the affair between Americans and the Adirondacks was by no means one of love at first sight. And even now, Schneider shows that Americans' relationship with the glorious mountains and rivers of the Adirondacks continues to change. As in every good romance, nothing is as simple as it appears. Amazon.com Review The vast Adirondack region of upstate New York is very much a wilderness, but one ringed by towns and close enough to major cities that it is heavily traveled. Long viewed as a natural playground, the Adirondacks were a favorite haunt of transcendentalist philosophers and , of conservationists such as and , of bohemians and hippies, and of back-to-the-land types. Still wild enough that wolf reintroduction has been proposed for the Adirondacks, the territory remains a powerfully inspiring place of refuge and recreation. Paul Schneider tells the story of this river-laced, forested land with imagination and a flair for just the right anecdote. From Library Journal Journalist Schneider has written a poignant, insightful history of New York State's Adirondack region. He relates here the life and lore of these scenic mountains and lakes (Whiteface, Mt. Marcy, Fulton Chain Lakes) from the region's earliest inhabitants (Haudenosaunce/Iroquois) through the advent of Henry Hudson (1609), the Revolutionary War, abolitionists (John Brown), 19th-century homesteaders, Hudson River School artists, tuberculosis patients to Melville Dewey's Lake Placid Club, the Adirondack Mountain Club, and the present environmental conservation efforts. Schneider duly records that this once wild and untamed region has accommodated the likes of Wil Durant, Paul Smith, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Presidents B. Harrison, Coolidge, Hoover, and T. Roosevelt. It is now up to our present legislators, he notes, to preserve what remains.?Ann E. Cohen, Rochester P.L., N.Y. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist There are no easy answers to the continuity debate about how to keep the Adirondacks "wild forever," or if that concept, which was mandated in 1885 by the New York legislature, is even an obtainable or desirable goal. However, with Schneider's ecological, social, and scientific history of the area, we see exactly why the region is in the condition it is in today. The bulk of Schneider's history details the progression of humans (including Native Americans, missionaries, trappers, farmers, miners, loggers, tanners, artists, romantics, and sportsmen and -women) who inhabited the area. With this long progression of users and abusers of the wilderness, is it possible to even consider the area wild or hope that it will be again? Schneider details some of the efforts of concerned volunteer groups and paid government officials who have worked over the years to this end and have arrived at different answers to that question. Although the text is not light reading, Schneider demonstrates that he can use language in a creative way. Randall Enos From Kirkus Reviews A crisp, filigreed history of the Adirondacks--from their beginnings in Grenville orogeny to last year's trapping harvest- -from Schneider, an editor at Mirabella. There is something about the Adirondacks--six million acres of forest and water and biting flies in northern New York State, half public, half private--that has drawn to it painters and scientists, hunters and trappers, the sick and weary looking for surcease, writers and philosophers in search of answers. Biologically, it sports an impressive 90 percent of the known animal species in the eastern half of the
